OVER AT HARRISON COLLEGE, where he remained until 1948, Bertie Callender was very active on the field and beyond the boundary.
He recalled: “I did all sorts of things.
I played cricket. I went into the First Division in 1947. George Griffith was the captain and on our team were people like David Lawless, Noel Symmonds, Horace King and Oliver Browne; in fact, in 1947 we beat Spartan on the small ground at the College during a First Division match.
“The Spartan team featured players like Clyde [later Sir Clyde] and Keith Walcott, George Carew, ‘Shell’ Harris and a whole heap of people like that.
“For college, David Lawless made 123, and Oliver Browne 96. I got two wickets in the first innings and five in the second as a medium pacer. I got George Carew in both innings. I was just 19 years old, but all these memories keep me alive.”
Bertie observed: “I played First Division cricket for two years – 1947 and 1948. Before that I was in the Second Division with Algie Symmonds and those boys. That’s why I think they made a big mistake when they put schools out of First Division cricket.”
When Bertie left school he got a job teaching at the Parry School. “It was a good experience. On the staff were people like Ernest Roachford, George Crick, Clifford Husbands [now Sir Clifford].
“We had four masters and the headmaster for the five forms. That was a great experience. We had people like Douglas Collymore, Calvin Springer and Rufus Brome [the Bishop]. I loved teaching and I spent two years there.
“The four of us were required to produce some prose, some each day and enter it in a book. I think Sir Clifford had one of those books. Something I will tell you but you might not want to publish this:
“When I started to teach, if I had to set a test I would make it add up to 20 or 50 or something like that so that it would multiply by five or by two and get 100. Clifford said one day around lunchtime, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you mathematicians; if you do it out of 60 the first two figures will give you the percentage. That was typical of the atmosphere at Parry. I did maths at school and he did classics but he was explaining the application of maths in its simplest form.
“In November 1945, after I had been at Parry for two years, I received a letter from pen pals in the islands. They told me that Albert Williams [later headmaster of Harrison College], who had been teaching maths at the Grenada Boys’ Secondary School had resigned to return to Barbados.
“I wrote the letter and was shocked. Within six days I got a reply from Rawle Jordan [he later became Inspector of Schools, Barbados] stating that I had been appointed and that he would be in Barbados over the next week to meet me.”
As he continued to look at the snapshots of those early years, Bertie described the discovery of the Antiguan Jean Pennyfeather, a maths major, who became his wife 51 years ago.
The romance: “We were both freshmen at the University in Jamaica. We became friendly and sometimes I used to carry her books. After one year I went up to Barney in Queen’s in the United States for the summer. She went to her grandmother in Harlem.
“A friend of Barney’s called me and said that he wanted to take me to a jazz concert, Jazz Under The Stars in Central Park that night. He called out a number of the greats like Lionel Hampton who would be performing, and then he said: ‘By the way, do you have a friend you would like to bring?’ I thought of how much Jean loved jazz, so I called her. She accepted and gave me her address. But it rained heavily that night. I took off my jacket and placed it across her shoulders.
“That action must have impressed her. It sealed my fate.”
